Can Muslims be one of 'us'? Thinking differently about difference

Asma BarlasABC Religion and Ethics
11 Sep 2013

The West experiences difference, not as a rich or enriching diversity, but as antithesis, mimicry and parody. This has been nowhere more apparent than in its historical dealings with Muslims.
Credit: www.shutterstock.com

The belief that people who are different from us can nonetheless inhabit "with us the space of common understanding," as Raimond Gaita puts it, is almost entirely missing from the dominant narratives Westerners have chosen to tell themselves about Islam and Muslims for a millennium and a half. As a result, the West has found it nearly impossible to think about Muslims in "morally relevant ways."

The phrase "morally relevant ways" is, of course, how Richard Rorty defined solidarity, which he admits is easier to feel with those whom we consider "one of 'us'" than with "people wildly different from ourselves." Even so, he believes it is to our own benefit to be able to include such people "in the range of 'us'." Yet, the West has almost never included Muslims in this range.

Indeed, the ideological template within which it continues to confront Islam rules out such a possibility by treating difference itself as wild and oppositional, reinscribing a long history of Western violence against Muslims as discrete and episodic - thus masking its continuities, and reframing many Western transgressions as acts of reverse violence by Muslims transforming Westerners into victims. There is simply no space here for the West to develop certain moral vocabularies in relation to Muslims.

The ways in which the West narrates itself in relation to Islam and Muslims is not only a window into its collective psyche, but also consequential for its own moral growth. Let me then trace the historical genealogies of some persistent anti-Islamic tropes and narratives.

A millennium later, Islam is once again being depicted as a sweeping problem by a secular West, partly because of the same desire not to know and the same fear of contamination that bedevilled the early Christians. This isn't to say that the fear and desire have remained constant over time and space, or that the West's history is unbroken, or that its images of Islam have been impervious to change. It is merely to note certain "tragic continuities" in Western attitudes that belie the "discontinuities and epochal shifts" marked by secularism, humanism and modernity.

If we tend not to see these, it could be because of a conceit of history, that one can draw "a line between now and then" as a way to be "done with the past." But, as Constantin Fasolt puts it, "the past lives and breathes ... right here and now" in the repetition of certain medieval Christian tropes about it, the Prophet and the Qur'an. I will consider each of these in turn.

From Antichrist to antithesis

The oldest trope is the oppositional positioning of Islam and the West, which dates to changing notions of "Christian community" in the mid-ninth century. Tomaz Mastnak notes that these shifts also induced a change in European views of the Arabs, who were the first Muslims they encountered and whom they ultimately came to see as "the enemy."

To earlier generations of Christians, they had been one among "pagan, or infidel, barbarians" who didn't merit much attention. For instance, the Battle of Poitiers in 733, depicted by later historians as having "saved Christian Europe from the Muslims," was to its own contemporaries just "one of many military encounters between Christians and Saracens." Even the Arab conquest of Spain didn't make it into a chronicle like Bede's. It was only when "Western unity" began to express itself as Christendom that Muslims also began to be described as the "normative enemies of Christianity."

What I find important in this context isn't that Christian unity was always fraught, but that it emerged around a view of the Saracens as the common enemy. As Pope Urban II declared before the First Crusade, the only form of "warfare that [was] righteous" for Christians was to "brandish your sword against Saracens." It was, in the words of one Fulcher, time for all "robbers" to become "soldiers of Christ" - a trope that would later on be mapped onto Islam along with the concept of "holy war" (a concept missing from the Qur'an itself).

By the high Middle Ages, according to Robert Southern, Christians had come to see in Islam not just "a sinister conspiracy against Christianity ... [but] that total negation of [it] ... which would mark the contrivances of Antichrist." For Southern, this fear grew out of the "ignorance of a confined space" and a reliance on biblical exegesis to explain Islam. However, since it was the Christians who lived in the "middle of Islam" - that is, in Muslim Spain - who embraced this view, it is questionable whether distance from Muslims had anything to do with their ignorance. If anything, as Southern himself argues, different modes of ignorance of Islam replaced one another in succession, persisting for centuries on end.

It is true, however, that from being the Antichrist in early medievalism, Islam went to being just an Antichrist by the early modern period (for instance, in Martin Luther's work). But even a millennium after its advent, it was being positioned as "directly opposite to the Christian Religion," by Hugo Grotius, the famous Dutch jurist. Writing at the time of the Eighty Years War between Spain and the Netherlands and the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants, Grotius was preoccupied by the schisms among Christians. In fact, he derided them for differing as much from one another as "heathens from Christians" and bearing "so much hatred and ill-will" toward one another as to undercut "the true spirit of charity, which is the bond of peace." Yet, it was not Christians or Christianity that Grotius blamed for creating bloodshed, but the "Mahometan Religion" which he excoriates as a religion of "robbers."

Growing secularism ushered in some new images of Islam and, for a while, the fashion of using Muslims for European self-critique. However, even in their fleeting role as Europe's civilized others, Muslims were being positioned as its antithesis and it was still the Europeans who were defining both identities. Then, too, views of Muslims as civilized didn't end their depictions as barbaric. As Nancy Bisaha argues, in spite of its cultural tolerance, secular humanism continued to draw on the idea of "Christian cultural superiority verses Eastern barbarity," becoming the bridge between "medieval and modern attitudes toward the East and Islam." If it no longer cast Muslims as "enemies of the faith," it reconstructed them as the "new barbarians" who now had to be confronted culturally and politically. Even Erasmus, who "challenged contemporary European notions of holy war and the Infidel" wasn't "immune to the rhetoric of Turkish barbarism."

The trope gradually came to include all Muslims and it continues to underpin some contemporary polemics against Islam, such as those by Orianna Fallaci. Significantly, she decried Islam in overtly Biblical terms in books like The Apocalypse, in which she denounced Muslim immigration as the latest phase of an assault begun seven centuries ago against Christian Europe with "the brutal incursions of the Ottoman Empire." At the same time, Fallaci also likened Muslims to Nazis and aligned Islamism with Nazism with which, she insisted, "no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West."

Though overblown, Fallaci's rhetoric conjured up Islam in its historically familiar role of the Antichrist and, even as she savaged Muslims, she cast the Europeans as their victims. It was on this point that even some of her critics came to her defence, praising her for resisting the "penitential narcissism that makes the West guilty of even that which victimizes it."

From devil to terrorist

The theme of European victimization at the hands of Muslims was also re-enacted with the republication of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet as a terrorist. Surprisingly, much of the secular intelligentsia feigned surprise that Muslims would be so insulted by such a depiction that some would respond to it with "real" violence.

I say "feigned" because it was precisely this reaction on which many people had banked to confirm their view that Muslims lack a sense of humour and appreciation for tolerance and freedom. The reactions of a few Muslims then became a way to portray not just the cartoonists but the principle of free speech itself as the victim of "Islamic" aggression.

Since much has been said on the subject, I will content myself with making just three points.

Egregious images of the Prophet date from medieval times and have a much older pedigree than does free speech; in effect, such images were never contingent on the idea or practice of freedom. The cartoons were merely the latest in this series of images and need to be looked at within the context of a larger historical narrative than arguments about free speech allow. Although this narrative also includes some salutary images, depictions of the Prophet have generally served as a foil for establishing European piety, innocence, reasonableness and - most recently - victimization. To medieval Christians, he was the Antichrist, a heathen idol, the devil, Mahound (as also in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses) and an imposter. He appears in all these guises from the Crusades right up to the Reformation. The depiction of the Prophet as a religious imposter during this period reached its literary apogee in Dante who consigned him to the eighth circle of hell. Two centuries later, he reappears as an Antichrist in Luther's work who mentions him two dozen times in a single book, "all in the form of demonization." Another century later, Grotius declared him a thief. In contrast to Jesus who "led an innocent life, against which no objection can be made," he says, the Prophet "was a long time a robber." Not satisfied with this comparison, he goes on to declare all Christians to be innocent. They "who embraced the law of Christ, were men who feared God and led innocent lives," he alleges, but "they who first embraced Mahometanism were robbers, and men void of humanity and piety." Such a view of Christian innocence, which is reflected in the West's tendency towards victimization, follows Grotius's rebuke in the same volume of Christians for hating one another. By the Enlightenment, critics were assailing the Prophet in the new language of secularism. Voltaire, for instance, decried him as the "worst type of ... fanatic" and Kant as "the greatest enemy of reason who ever lived." These "classically inspired secular images," as we know, have survived into the present and the Danish cartoons illustrate that. They have merely put a contemporary political spin on medieval images of the Prophet so that he now appears as a terrorist rather than as the Antichrist; however, both images are equally aberrant and evoke fear and loathing. This is why framing the "cartoon controversy" as a free speech issue deflects attention from the cartoons' genealogy.

However, even if one wants to talk only about free speech, the reality is that speech allows not only expressions of dissent or critique or humour, but also assertions of power. If "the exercise of power is inseparable from its display," then enacting it in some way is "essential to reproducing domination." To take an example from the period of American slavery, "domination depended upon demonstrations of the slave-holder's dominion and the captive's abasement." That is, the "owner's display of mastery was just as important as the legal title to slave property." Something similar seems to be at work in the West today where free speech allows some within it to represent and reproduce Western epistemic dominion over Muslims by desecrating their sacred symbols at will. In fact, through speech they are able to achieve what they cannot in real life. Even if this displacement from the physical to the psychic signifies the limits of Western power, the point is that free speech is integral to its display and it is as much this display as the contents of attacks that angers many Muslims.

The cartoons aren't funny because terrorism isn't funny and they aren't ironic because most Westerners suspect Muslims of being terrorists; as such, one must ask what their value and function really is. In a different context, Saidiya Hartman argues that organizing "innocent amusements and spectacles of mastery" is a way for the dominant classes "to establish their dominion." The cartoons are very much enactments of mastery. They also reinforce intra-Western solidarity against Muslims produced by images of suffering at the hands of a common enemy since they can only work if most Westerners are willing to claim 11 September 2001 as their own trauma.

From burning to banning the Qur'an

A final theme I will consider is that of destroying the Qur'an, which surfaces as a desire to burn and to ban it, as the Dutch politician Geert Wilders advocates doing. An early instance of burning the Qur'an occurs in the sixteenth century play, Tamburlaine. Written by Christopher Marlowe at a time of the "Turkish threat," it celebrates the Mongol defeat of the Turks and, in it, the hero "orders his soldiers to burn the Qur'an before his eyes as a token of his great victory."

Of course, Wilders is no Tamburlaine; he doesn't lead a victorious army and, in the end, he couldn't even destroy the "fascist" Qur'an, as he calls it, on film - a fact that signals for many Europeans their emasculation at the hands of Muslims. However, his desire to get rid of it isn't any different from the one Marlowe projected onto Tamburlaine. And, much as fears of the "Turkish threat" were the backdrop for Marlowe's play, secular fears of the "Muslim threat" are the backdrop for Wilders's diatribes against Islam.

Another instance of Dutch intellectuals vilifying the Qur'an on film occurred in Submission, in which lines from it were scrawled on Muslim women's semi-naked bodies as a way to prove that it sanctions their abuse. Although some Muslims also believe this to be true, as Talal Asad argues, the Qur'an "does not need" to justify violence. Some people may appeal to scriptural authority because it seems "just - or else expedient. But that's very different from saying that they are constrained to do so."

Moreover, reading sexual oppression into the Qur'an does little to advance the cause of Muslim women's liberation, to which the filmmakers, van Gogh and Hirsi Ali, claimed to be committed. In this context, Hirsi Ali's view that such provocations are meant to enable Muslim self-critique and cross-cultural dialogue is disingenuous. For observant Muslims, seeing the Qur'an desecrated can never be the conduit for self-critique, or, for that matter for liberation. Then, too, there can be no dialogue between two groups if only the values of one are allowed to structure the conversation.

I want to note the media's sensationalist references to van Gogh's murder by a Dutch Muslim as a "ritual slaughter" and a "home grown jihad," which showed that "traditional values have been eroded in a country roiled by a rise in Muslim extremism." A murder is not a jihad, either in the Qur'an or in the eyes of most Muslims, and to regard one murder, no matter how heinous, as evidence of impending doom is not just hyperbolic but also duplicitous given the nature and scale of violence that the West has done to itself and to others.

That such distortions fail to evoke much outrage testifies to the extent to which anti-Muslim prejudice has been normalized in the West and to the partiality of those Westerners who, while pressing Muslims for self-critique, remain silent about such glaring public displays of anti-Islamic bigotry.

Rethinking difference, tasting guilt

I should clarify that my intent here is not to deny that Muslims have done, and continue to do, violence or that Islam sanctions certain kinds of violence. Rather, I want to demonstrate that this truth masks other equally compelling truths and it silences the very histories and theologies on which it draws to assert itself. By reciting some of these histories, I am trying to apportion the burden of violence more fairly, by assigning the West's share to it. I am also trying to draw attention to the ideological imprint of medieval biblical exegesis on secular sensibilities, as evidenced in the continuing depiction of Islam as the Antichrist.

What the eternal return of this pejorative image reveals is that the West can only live its experiences of Islam, as Gilles Deleuze might say, "in the mode of repetition." While this is not the place to sort through different theories of repetition, I should note that, for Freud, repetition signalled the return of a repressed trauma, and trauma, says Cathy Caruth, "is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available." The "story of trauma," therefore, attests to "its endless impact on a life." More to the point, what makes something traumatic is not "the simple violent or original event in an individual's past," but "its very unassimilated nature - the way in which it was precisely not known in the first instance." It is the not knowing that "returns to haunt the survivor." While this involves some self-harm, it also opens up the possibility for a person "to attempt to master what was never fully grasped in the first place."

That their encounters with Islam and Muslims have turned out to be a lasting trauma for many Westerners seems clear enough; but what precisely they have been unable to grasp or to assimilate after nearly fourteen centuries, or which wounds cry out for redress, or what sorts of self-correction or mastery they yearn to achieve through this repetition-repression cycle, I can't say. What I do know is that this cycle forecloses feeling any solidarity with Muslims, at least at a collective level. (I realize that there is plenty of goodwill for Muslims in the West, but it tends to be localized to individual relationships.)

Let me say something about the West's approach to difference as it has manifested itself historically towards Muslims. As my brief review illustrates, it experiences difference not as a rich or enriching diversity, but as antithesis, mimicry and parody. Even Rorty thinks of it as "wild," which is why he can call its erasure solidarity: "including others in the range of 'us'." In a Rortian universe, then, solidarity means assimilating the other and one must wonder if, in the end, an other will remain whom one will need to think of in moral terms. It seems to me that the only way to avoid such a paradox is to start by thinking about difference differently.

For instance, Raimond Gaita's view that people can potentially inhabit "the space of common understanding" implies that what is at issue isn't the identity of the self or the other. Rather, it is a willingness to be "unselfing" and responsive to the "disciplined individuality of the Other." In effect, what seems primary in Gaita's conception isn't a fixed view of difference but the relational nature of encounters that can also remake the self - that is, make it different from itself - as a result of its engagement with the Other.

I should also note that the Qur'an doesn't present difference as threatening or as inequality or hierarchy. Rather, it teaches that God created us from a single self and made us "into nations and tribes, so that [we] might come to know one another." Thus, differences exist by God's will and their purpose is to enable both self-awareness and mutual recognition; in fact, one is the condition for the other.

These two ways of thinking about difference avoid the contradictions inherent in many liberal discourses. However, having said this, I suspect another view of difference alone cannot yield a moral view of Muslims.

Writing about the possibility of the United States making reparations to Native Americans, David Williams argues that it will depend on whether it can let go of its own "yearning for moral purity" and accept "the moral cloudiness of its past." It is not possible, he says, to "rewind the camera and play the story forward again ... to begin anew, morally fresh;" there will always be a "moral remainder." Hence, what is needed is opening oneself to guilt: not a self-indulgent or destructive guilt or the kind from which "everyone gets to feel washed clean," but the sort that makes people realize that "We tasted guilt, and it did not poison us. It merely opened our eyes."

This argument could easily be extended to the West, but I fear it gestures to a very tangled reality and it leaves out the calculus of power. Arguably, it is the moral cloudiness of its past that also explains the West's yearning for purity, and yet this longing keeps it from admitting its crimes against not just native peoples but also African- Americans and countless others, including Muslims and its internal others.

But without admitting culpability, the West cannot taste the kind of guilt of which Williams speaks. Then, too, the hubris and moral corrosion resulting from centuries of exerting unbridled power are unlikely to be tempered by the moral constraints of a guilt that only they can feel who see themselves as just one among many of this earth's inhabitants. To be self-aggrandizing and all-powerful is already to be beyond opening one's eyes.

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Comments (25)

Niels Christensen :

29 Nov 2013 10:48:17pm

Barlas forget's a couple of things. Islam are also always represented through some kind of power. If Barlas want to criticize western views of Islam ex. in relation to the ottomans she should also discuss the ottomans views of the west. But as so many muslim researchers she contrasts an idealized view of Islam as an idea agaienst western europeans living in a historical context. . This kind of comparison is deeply uninteresting and ahistorical.

Hudson Godfrey :

I'm often critical of a sub-editor's work in tacking a headline onto an article, but perhaps this one is done a kindness by the question "Can Muslims be one of 'us'?"

Reading the article and looking at the comments I can't help thinking how lucky I am to have paid more attention to Monty Python than the Bible or the Qur'an.

Brian says "Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!"

Maybe we answer the question "Can Muslims be one of 'us'?" by considering first what's so essential about being "one of us". I have in that vein news for Muslims and people of dozens of other creeds alike, I don't want to be one of you. And you if you're honest probably don't want to be me either.

So sometimes if I doodle a figure wearing a turban that might on the face of things seem insulting why not consider the prospect that since I don't know what the prophet looked like, and thanks to a predilection against portraying him neither must you, then the conclusion is obvious that I have not achieved a likeness of his holy visage and should therefore not be dignified with your outrage.

I heard a story about an Armenian Muslim who emigrated to Greece. There his children could attend only one school where as part of the curriculum a mass was held once a week. The migrant was a simple man who conveyed his thoughts through an interpreter. When asked whether he worried about his children attending Christian services he replied slowly, "There is only one God. What harm can it do?".

Kumar :

18 Sep 2013 6:35:57pm

**much of the secular intelligentsia feigned surprise that Muslims would be so insulted by such a depiction that some would respond to it with "real" violence.**

I detect something dangerous here. That is the idea that it is the level of insult one feels that leads to violence. I feel intense insult when religious people imply that unless I follow the dictates of their gods I deserve to be tortured in hell. But the desire to commit violent acts towards those pushing this sort of hate speech never crosses my mind. Note that during the last four years I've been told by two of my co-workers that hell awaits unless I accept Jesus.

I think that Barlas is contributing to the problem in a small but insidious way. Implied is the idea that the level of insult we feel will determine whether we resort to violence in response to insults. Unfortunately there is a meme that violence can be an indication of love for one's god or gods. The more you love your god, the more insulted you feel, the more likely your response will be violent. This very bad theology and very bad morality.

The late Christopher Hitchens used to describe the Christian god as a genocidal dictator. He made numerous other similar statements. However he did not seem to elicit violent responses from the hundreds of millions for whom this would have been a grave insult. Is the Hitchens/Christianity non-violent situation a paradox, or a miracle perhaps? Of course not. This is not a paradox because the overwhelmingly predominant meme within Western Christianity is that it is totally inappropriate to react violently even to the most vociferous insults directed at Christianity. Check out the debate (it is on Youtube) between Christopher Hitchens and his brother Peter (a devout Christian) in the Fountain Street Church. The former hurled insult after insult at the Bible and Christianity and no violence resulted. This was in a Church! Had the equivalent insults been directed at Islam in a Mosque in a Muslim majority country, followed by the equivalent Youtube video, the outcome would have been different. The meme that violence is an appropriate response to blasphemy has been nurtured by the rulings of various schools of Islamic jurisprudence for centuries. The death penalty has been a common judgement for this. The violence is a problem of memes and by that I mean it is cultural. Similar memes used to be common amongst western Christians. Memes can die out or become exceedingly rare.

There are two consistent and non-discriminatory solutions to the problem of violence when someone insults our beliefs be they political, philosophical, or spiritual. (1) Potentially insulting speech should not be tolerated. OR(2) Potentially insulting speech should be tolerated but violence due to this speech should not be tolerated.

I like solution (2). It means we don't have to remove the passages in the Bible and the Quran that denigrate

Kumar Continued :

20 Sep 2013 12:00:45pm

I like solution (2). It means we don't have to remove the passages in the Bible and the Quran that denigrate people having sex outside of marriage, that imply that torturing people in Hell is righteous, that denigrate homosexual activity, that denigrate the worship of many gods, that denigrate idol worship etc. Solution (2) means that socialists can still denigrate capitalism and capitalists can still denigrate socialism. Christians can still ridicule the idea that the universe came into being from nothing in a big bang, and they can still ridicule theory of evolution for suggesting our forbears were monkeys. Vegans can still denigrate meat eating. The list could go on and on.

What is totally unacceptable is for religious people to have their most cherished beliefs given protection from insult whilst the most cherished beliefs of non-religious people (be they political or philosophical) have no equivalent protection.

Sadly there are some selfish people who want their beliefs to be given SPECIAL protection.

JoeBloggs :

23 Sep 2013 10:18:50am

You make a well reasoned point.

Anyone who thinks that violence is an appropriate response to a perceived insult is clearly mentally unstable and arguably not part of the vast majority of the human species which is mentally compentent and mature enough to know that killing or hurting people over mere words or pictures is inappropriate behaviour.

Mines A Newt :

18 Sep 2013 2:12:12pm

Barlas’s article states that “Westerners” are unable to achieve a space of common understanding with Muslims. Barlas says tThe West” is also unable to think about Islam in morally relevant ways. Moreover, Barlas tells us that “the West” thinks of Muslims as terrorists, the anti-Christ, and so on. In fact Barlas tells us that “most Westerners suspect Muslims of being terrorists.”

Gee, “the West” must be full of hate, mustn’t it? Oh, hang on: it’s Barlas telling us how horrible “the West” is, along with all those people: “Westerners”.

So who’s doing the “othering”? Isn't it Barlas?

Two other minor points. First, Barlas argues that free speech has nothing to do with the Danish cartoons, on the bizarre ground that prohibitions on portrayals of Muhammad pre-date the notion of free speech. Actually, the concept of free speech pre-dates Islam, being implicitly affirmed in Athenian democracy and explicitly affirmed in the Roman Republic (it was the first law set out in the constitution of the Roman Republic).

But even if her history wasn’t bunk, her argument would make no sense. This isn’t the seventh century and Australia isn’t a theocracy. One person may think Muhammad was the perfect human being, and another person, like me, might think he was a murderer, a serial rapist, and a number of other very, very bad things.

Barlas said, “there can never be dialogue between two groups if only the values of one are allowed to structure the conversation.” Good! So let her be consistent about her statement. She can put her view in any terms she likes. And so can those who, like me, have very different views from her.

Two other points. Someone’s already noted Barlas’s howler about Bede’s Chronicle: it didn't mention the Muslim conquest of Spain because it was an English chronicle and Bede had died before Spain was invaded. I’d add that if Barlas thinks Tamberlaine is the “hero” of a Christopher Marlowe play, then she’s cited something she hasn’t read.

It’s two plays, not one, and Tamberlaine's the villain, a treacherous and cruel tyrant from far-away Asia who threatens Europe. If she want to make generalisations about hundreds of years of “the West”, it helps to know more about “the West” than Barlas, by her own showing, has managed.

Second, unlike Barlas, I support the idea that all countries involved in the African slave trade should pay reparations to help undo the damage done to that continent’s people and its diaspora. The African slave trade was begun by Arab Muslims around CE 870, and Muslim-ruled countries maintained that trade until at least the twentieth century.

Perhaps Barlas might give her views on how Saudi Arabia, for example, should be paying its share of the reparations. And acknowledge that an Islamic apologist is in no position to use the slave trade, of all things, as a stick with which to beat “the West”.

Mines A Newt :

20 Sep 2013 4:58:08pm

Yes, you're right. I had noticed it, after hitting "Post comment", and I was hoping I'd get around to correcting my own mistake before anyone else did. One more reminder never to post anything from memory. But although Bede's life and the Muslim invasion of Spain do overlap a bit, the last years of the Chronicle are concerned exclusively with England.

On the other hand, there are Spanish Chronicles that describe some of the early fightback against the Arab and Berber invaders, like the battle of Tours/Poitiers. Arab chronicles also talked about resistance happening from within areas occupied by the invaders. (Though the Visigoths, being Catholic and engaged in persecuting the mainly Arian peasantry, were even less popular than the Muslim occupiers.) But Barlas's claim that Spain didn't mind being invaded isn't supported by the evidence she cites, and is contradicted by other evidence she doesn't cite.

One last thing, it's interesting who Barlas calls a "Westerner", given that she writes about "Westerners" with such enormous disdain. For example she dismisses Theo van Gogh and Ayan Hirst Asi as "Westerners". But Asi is from Somalia, which wasn't part of the "West" last time I looked. But Barlas doesn't like what Asi says, so Asi's a "Westerner" too.

Ibrahim :

24 Sep 2013 1:08:43pm

Perhaps "Westerner" is a term meaning non-Muslim. Islamists are currently attacking Shia, Sunnis, Bahai, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Copts, Indians, Filipinos and Africans et al for their non-Muslim, othering effrontery. Just who does give Muslims their rightful place?

Anne L Plurabelle :

12 Sep 2013 11:44:57pm

As I was reading this it occurred to me that today 11 to 12 of September is the anniversary of the Battle of Vienna. Surely one of the Greatest days in Western Civilisation greater even than Armistice Day or VE Day.

It is the Day when the west finally and permanently stopped the Muslim imperialist hordes from absorbing Europe and annihilating Christian civilisation. It took some 250 years to reclaim Europe and free Christians but it was the start.

Why does one talk here about Europe's Independence day?

Because one way and another everything that the article accuses the West of is the same in reverse of what the Muslims were doing to Europe then. The pious self righteousness I detect in the article is misplaced. it is a sort of roundabouts and swings. Never forget that the great Christian place of worship the Hagia Sophia was seized and desecrated by the Muslim hordes. It has never been returned to the Church not has there even been the slighest contrition for the Imperialist colonisation of Constantinople or Europe. I think the cultural suspicion of the West for Imperial Islam is well founded.

There are no innocents, both civilisations are capable of and have indeed practised great evil. However, time will tell if it can be mutually managed neither side is historically on the moral high ground, I am sure we will be able to live together well in the near future. In the mean time the return of the Cathedral of Holy Wisdom would be a nice gesture perhaps? Would Muslims acknowledge the right of Christians to reclaim Constantinople as part of their holy heartland?

Kumar :

14 Sep 2013 1:58:39pm

If any place should be handed back to the Christian hordes from the Muslim hordes, it should be Antioch. This was probably the first city to have a Christian majority. Catholics and Orthodox regard their second most important saint (Cephas/Peter) as having been the first Bishop of Antioch. It was a centre for early evangelising of Christianity's greatest Saint - Paul of Tarsus. It was there that Cephas and Paul had their famous falling out. Most importantly the Christian scriptures say that it was in Antioch that people who followed the new Jesus cult were first called Christians. The town of Byzantium had no significance to Christians at all in the first three hundred years of the Jesus Cult.

Kumar :

17 Sep 2013 11:10:55pm

A little historical accuracy might suffice. The Jewish temple was destroyed by pagan Romans around AD 70, more than five centuries before Muslim armies captured Jerusalem - in AD 637. I imagine that it is the Romans you should admonish for desecration. Christian East Romans built a Church on the temple mount. I suppose you could call that a desecration. Interestingly Jewish control of Jerusalem was restored in the period AD 614 to 629. Persian and Jewish forces captured Jerusalem and massacred large numbers of Christians in 614. East Roman Christians recaptured the city in 629 and massacred large numbers of Jews. When Muslim forces captured the city in 637 Jews were allowed to return the Jerusalem albeit in dhimmi capacity.

harbi :

12 Sep 2013 4:26:50pm

It is said that the best defence is a good offence and the author is certainly pulling out all stops in this regard.By relentlessly claiming that it is non-Muslims who think of Muslims as the "other", she almost bludgeons us into believing that it must be so.But, of course, the reverse is true.There are countless Islamic texts attesting to this fact but the following is representative of many:"O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people."Quran 5:51http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/quran/verses/005-qmt.phpThe above is not a singular, cherry picked verse.It is not an anomaly.It is representative of how the Quran talks about non-believers.Arguably, it is less representative than the verse below, variations of which appear throughout the Koran:"They desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper..."Quran 4:89http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/quran/verses/004-qmt.php

Perhaps it is not so much that "the West has almost never included Muslims in ... the range of 'us' ", but that doctrinal Islam categorically forbids any such integration?

MagicWords :

12 Sep 2013 12:46:10pm

Christians are free from Christianity. i.e. They can live their life in peace with a personal God and their own interpretation of the bible (if they've bothered to read it). They can freely choose to adopt or reject the Christian viewpoints presented to them and they are also free to reject Christianity completely. It is the same for most mainstream religions in western/westernised societies.

It is not the middle ages. The "West" is no longer "Christendom" and it plays a different game now. Muslim's will be "us" when they are free of Islam.

ingenuous :

12 Sep 2013 9:47:42pm

Magicwords, you have expressed my view with an admirable economy of words. Well done.

Christianity has softened (mellowed?) sufficiently that practitioners have the freedom to ignore the more extreme aspects. Islam seems hundreds of years behind in this, and is still full of sharp, raw edges.

It is up to Muslims to remove the extreme aspects of Islam. Sadly, I don't expect this to happen in my lifetime.

elaine newby :

12 Sep 2013 10:05:05am

Here, may I supply, as a possible basis for common purpose (a 'shared space' of freedom of religion) the defence of the right to circumcise, which has been called into question by a Koln/Cologne court which determined that circumcision constituted 'bodily harm' and as such 'potentially punishable by law'. It also said that a child should make their faith decision at 14 and not have such a decision pre-empted by infant circumcision, completely ignoring its role of entry to the faith for Jewish boys, for example, and for both Jews and Muslims, obedience to G_d's command to the children of Abraham.

Writer and sociologist Rolf Scheider asks whether this is a threat to the right to religious freedom (which in the case of both Judaism and Islam necessarily involves the practice of circumcision of males).

The Court, according to Scheider, saw such a practice as not necessary for the 'welfare' of the child - again ignoring tis cultural importance. He adds that the view of necessity for a certain age for 'decision' in regards to faith might even pose a threat to the practice of infant baptism ... or religious education - perhaps a long bow, but not necessarily unexpected, given the extremes to which secularism can over time reach (witness the French Revolution, the Russian and Chinese Communist Revolutions, Nazi Germany), but which the International Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Human Rights are designed to thwart by including the right to freedom of religion and freedom of expression and a child's right to their cultural heritage etc.

It is such rights where we may indeed find common ground - certainly as parents, religiously minded adults share their concerns for their children and their diverging from the traditions of their families etc but generally also share a commitment to a secular state that permits a free exchange of information, greater mutual understanding of different faith expressions, and a belief in the desirability of a 'faith of the heart' not mere outward expression that masks dissent and unhappiness. We cry together. We ultimately commit ourselves and our families to a G_d of Mercy.

And certainly the vast majority of us would not favour 'nipping' faith in the bud by outlawing religious education or instruction (but would oppose any promotion of violence between adherents of various communities) or unnecessarily restricting religious practices such as circumcision or infant baptism.

Scheider's article can be found at: http://en.qantara.de/content/german-court-ruling-over-ritual-circumcision-kulturkampf-against-muslims-and-jews

ingenuous :

I am astounded that you consider genital mutilation to be a cultural choice for parents and not a human rights issue for children.

Have ceremonies, bless water, chant, read books, tell stories, whatever you please. But when you permanently mark (and in my view, disfigure) a child to include them in a group then you have crossed a line, and the law should be there to stop you crossing it.

It does not matter that this was once culturally important. It matters that this is the 21st century and we should be beyond this now.

I would like to express the full force of my view in this matter, but I fear it would not pass moderation.

elaine newby :

12 Sep 2013 9:35:15am

Although I genuinely appreciate the contribution regarding the ongoing (yet changing) relationship between Islam and Christianity, this article appears to somewhat oversimplify the relationship between Christianity and Islam, particularly in relation to Protestantism.

An early Pope reputedly first thought it was a sect of Christianity then a heresy. This would be understandable due to similarities - ie belief in virgin birth, the existence of Christ though distinct disagreement on the resurrection. Prostration in prayer (now seen as typically Muslim) echoes the early practice of Christians (and retained in ME liturgical practice and in the words of even Western hymns), while the times of prayer echo the practices of early religious orders.

Perhaps that early Pope (and others) saw Islam as an early 'Protestant-like' - the word did not yet exist - movement, given the similarity re the Trinity - witness the anti-Trinitarian yet clearly 'Christ as Messiah' and a or 'first-born' 'Son of G_d' statements of faith of contemporary Jehovah's Witnesses and Christadelphians (a position tolerated by some but largely viewed as heretical by the early and even later Church). The early observed practice of Christians being able to share the Muslim worship space - but obviously not erect idols / images - also bears witness to some early 'commonalities (as, some might say, did the original practice of Muslims in orienting prayer towards Jerusalem).

The second to last point on idols/images brings up Luther's appreciation of Islam's disgust at idol worship (something Protestants detested in the practice of Catholicism as they viewed it and in the case of the iconoclastic movement that often accompanied Protestantism's rise, frequently destroyed or defaced, much as their current Islamist 'brethren' do. It was also a practice of a number of missionary organisations - and one undertaken by converts rather than the 'invaders' in others).

As for 'an anti-christ', Luther and other Protestants clearly viewed Catholicism as an antichrist (and some viewed it as 'the' antichrist) perched on the seven hills of Rome. Indeed many Protestant movements at their naissance and later (see Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland) were clear that Catholocism was 'the' anti-Christ - Islam didn't even get a 'look-in'. (See Lutheran and Anglican/Presbyterianviews as expressed in the Smalcald Articles, Book of Concord; and Westminster Confession respectively).

On the other hand, Catholicism - citing more ancient authorities - often expected the antichrist to be of Jewish descent and so able to claim to be the Messiah, reside on the seven hills of Jerusalem, build a new Temple and so desecrate that of ancient times (See e.g.,Iraneus 'Against Heresies' (189 AD); Hippolytus 'The Antichrist' 200 AD). (Some also see it as partly fulfilled by Romans setting up a statue of Zeus/Jupiter on Temple Mount or of Caligula himself in the (Second or Her

Ibrahim :

11 Sep 2013 9:17:11pm

From the viewpoint of a devout promoter of Islam to the West, this is an exemplary work. Islam could scarcely be shown in a better light in comparison to the ignorant, irreverent, monolithically exclusivist ‘West’.

“[The West] experiences difference not as a rich or enriching diversity, but as antithesis, mimicry and parody.” says Dr Barlas. It is interesting that she sees things that way, considering what is routinely parodied in Islamic countries.

Nevertheless, anyone who actually thinks the USA or Australia are less diverse and accepting of culture, religion, sexuality or belief, than any Islamically governed country might well be capable of accepting the premises of Dr Barlas’ article.

I venture that the diverse, enriching type of country is the one that refugees clamour to go to and become citizens. Countries that hate diversity are the ones that refugees flee from. I don’t know what Dr Barlas defines “the West” as, or if she claims to be a member of it, or what she wants from it. But a fitting definition might contain those countries that refugees aspire to become citizens of, and in which they can be an atheist, or not, and state their beliefs against any religious dogma without risk of punishment, and in which rights are not conditional on membership of a religion. From the article, I understand that Dr Barlas takes the West to be that part of the world that has failed to endorse and claim for itself Islamic ideology.

The problem with making a dichotomy between “Islam” and “the West” is that the two are not analogous. One is a religious dogma, in which Muhammad has specifically forbidden criticism (blasphemy or apostasy) under punishment of death. The other is a collection of nations from Japan, to the United States, from Australia to Israel to Iceland, not joined by religion or geography, or language, but mostly by secular government, respect for human rights, and freedom of expression and belief. These nations endorse the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, the 50 or so countries subject to Islamic dogma have specifically made human rights subordinate to Sharia.

So, while a Muslim is quite entitled to criticise “the West” as Dr Barlas does, Islamic ideology could not countenance that anyone, even a non-Muslim, has a right to criticise the Quran or Muhammad or disobey Islamic doctrine against drawing Muhammad. Hence comes the Muslim justification for violence over the “Muhammad cartoons”. It is no surprise that Dr Barlas, as a Muslim, condemns the artists as moral delinquents and endorses the sentiments of Muslims who think that their physical expressions of “offence” have some worthwhile meaning. What would surprise me would be if Dr Barlas allowed herself any criticism of the commands of Muhammad and the Quran. Presumably, she would accept that any criticism she made would deserve any Muslim expression of outrage it provoked, just like the cartoons.

skepto :

15 Sep 2013 9:49:22pm

Excellent points Ibrahim. A philosophy/religion that is intolerant towards any criticism or critical analyses of it's basic tenets,founders, texts etc or forbids one leaving the faith or changing to another on threat of death is one steeped in a medieval mindset that has no place in 21st century life without serious reform. Christianity has changed enormously over the centuries and it's basic text is under constant scrutiny,interpretation and reavaluation.Religion, like the people who invented it, needs to laugh at itself occasionally and lighten up.Violent Jihad, verbalizing the west, angry tirades, schoolyard arguments all suggest a religion in crisis and followers highly insecure about their beliefs and the ultimate power of their god.

On the Wider Web

The violence, and responses to it, have raised a slew of questions. Is it helpful, or even accurate, to characterize these killings as religiously motivated? How have the attack and responses to it helped to construct or entrench the identities said to be in conflict? Should the events be understood in the context of France's history of satire or its history of colonialism? Can the two be separated in this case? What is the significance of the willingness of many not only to affirm free expression, but also to identify themselves with the magazine? Are there limits to the freedom of expression?

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. The Islamic State awaits the army of "Rome," whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.

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